Hang with the Ars Editors for a Friday Fireside Chat!

The tablet scene has changed wildly in the past two weeks. Microsoft and Google have each announced their own "in house" designs (Microsoft Surface and Nexus 7, respectively), taking the reins from OEMs (to varying degrees) in order to combat the dominance of the iPad. And to make matters even crazier, the Ars editorial staff has been so busy that our normal schedule of IRC cage matches has slipped. [Little known fact: our office is fully virtual, and so is our watercooler. IRC is where we do most of our group discussion/bitter recriminations.]

We got to thinking: why not have our chat in public? Thus, we will be hosting a fireside chat (read: live chat throwdown) Friday, June 29 at 3:30 pm EDT to talk/argue about the new devices & strategies from Google and Microsoft. Join Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng, Microsoft Editor Peter Bright, Gaming Editor Kyle Orland and your emcee Social Editor Cesar Torres, as we talk about what the future of tablet computing looks like. Most important of all, we'll be taking your questions, and posting the best comments you have.

Promoted Comments

I really enjoyed it and hope you do more. Despite the really quick pace, I was able to get a couple comments in and have them promoted up for the group to discuss, which was sort of a thrill.

One way that might help the pacing a bit is a more structured format for the panel's discussion: Instead of an IRC-style freeforall, one person acts as moderator for the group to guide everyone's conversations ("Peter, Kyle came out in clear support of nun beating. Your take?"), and introducing reader comments as appropriate. Since the conversation tended to shift topics more organically, that's what I think made it hard for readers to come in at the middle and still try to make a contribution.

4165 posts | registered Jul 26, 2003

Cesar Torres
Cesar is the Social Editor at Ars Technica. His areas of expertise are in online communities, human-computer interaction, usability, and e-reader technology. Cesar lives in New York City. Emailcesar.torres@arstechnica.com//Twitter@Urraca

So....the topic of discussion will only tablets and their future ecosystems.....?

That's where we will start, but who knows where we will end up. I predict a lot of talk about MS Office, previous MS phones, Active Sync, etc., as I insist those are super important and I think everyone else is on the same page.

Any topics that are taboo? Like, say, Ars' insistence that fluff pieces be put up all the time? Or the lack of an ETC section anymore? Site glitches? Horrible photographs for published articles?

If there are any off-limits topics, you should get to them now, I think. Of course, the staff should be well-prepared for anything like that, as well, and try not to take offense. I may pop in, actually

I'm not sure how this 'live blog' thing was supposed to work....I posted up a multi-question 'comment', and there has been no response at all, after 10 or so minutes......And it seems mostly just the staff talking about....whatever......

Dunno, really isn't working for me. Logged in, but was still listed as "Anonymous," and SEVERAL posts never got added. Mebbe editors are given internal preference, or something, when the system has to sort several posts simultaneously.

The thing that was difficult for me with the liveblog design is that, while I don't know everybody face just yet, the posters with avatars was difficult to see the names. The light gray "By <name>" was hard to read on the black background. If you could bold it in white, it'd look great.

I'm going to post here, one last thing, that I repeated a few times in the chat but it never made it out of the back-end. Is there a way to make the live chats work with our Ars log-ins? I was signed in for the chat but had to re-add my name to every comment, as everyone else did. Why not just have our handles carry over?

I hope this doesn't sound too "first world problem."

Edit: The chat was fun. I look forward to the next one. I didn't mean for the post to sound so debbi-downer. I'll go find someone else's parade to rain on.

Dunno, really isn't working for me. Logged in, but was still listed as "Anonymous," and SEVERAL posts never got added. Mebbe editors are given internal preference, or something, when the system has to sort several posts simultaneously.

But I'm (enviously) lurking

You folks must have a blast on IRC.

ADD heaven!

Glad you joined in! It was our first time doing it this way. I am glad you let us know what issues you were having so we could troubleshoot. We got a ton of comments, and we had to put them on a cue to make sure the chat didn't become too confusing. Thanks again!

Called it! Just as I was waking my computer. Yay for cellular data though.

So really, that was a lot of fun and I would love to be able to participate in more of them. With the Ars staff spread around the world, I don't think a video chat would be any more productive than text. It just doesn't work as well when the hosts are not in the same room barring some special event that requires one to be away and I agree with the point made in the chat it would put much more prominence on the Ars staff over us plebes as Aurich called us.

I do have a question though about the liveblog tool. What was up with the small text vs normal text that some of the Ars staff used sometimes?

I hadn't intended to drop in, but I happened to be checking the site at the time, and new reasons to procrastinate are good.

I found the format annoying: the automatic scrolling makes it difficult to catch up during the discussion. Also, if my comments weren't fast enough, they were outdated quickly as the sub-topic shifted.

I'm sure there's not a lot better available, but when I think about it, a better interface would be like drilling down in Windows Explorer, with only a couple of levels of depth allowed, where the mods picked the few main topics, and you added to whichever thread you wanted. We're very used to reading down, at the very minimum, not up, and I don't want the page to change where I'm looking when I'm trying to read.

The picture capabilities were a nice touch. The content was decent, but wildly disjointed, which is about what I'm used to from multiple parties talking cross-purposes on multiple related sub-topics.

I really enjoyed it and hope you do more. Despite the really quick pace, I was able to get a couple comments in and have them promoted up for the group to discuss, which was sort of a thrill.

One way that might help the pacing a bit is a more structured format for the panel's discussion: Instead of an IRC-style freeforall, one person acts as moderator for the group to guide everyone's conversations ("Peter, Kyle came out in clear support of nun beating. Your take?"), and introducing reader comments as appropriate. Since the conversation tended to shift topics more organically, that's what I think made it hard for readers to come in at the middle and still try to make a contribution.

I'm going to post here, one last thing, that I repeated a few times in the chat but it never made it out of the back-end. Is there a way to make the live chats work with our Ars log-ins? I was signed in for the chat but had to re-add my name to every comment, as everyone else did. Why not just have our handles carry over?

I hope this doesn't sound too "first world problem."

Edit: The chat was fun. I look forward to the next one. I didn't mean for the post to sound so debbi-downer. I'll go find someone else's parade to rain on.

yup getting it to work with the ars handles would be better. although autofill took care of filling in the name after the first time around so this really is a first world problem of the highest order.

Were the comments moderated before appearing or was it just not working correctly? I have no idea how "live blog" is supposed to work but several of my comments didn't appear.

We did moderate, which is why some showed up later or were not on-topic. Things moved really fast. Sorry if some of yours didn't get posted. What other feedback do you have on how things went today?

OK, cheers. It could get confusing otherwise I guess. I thought it was kind of difficult to get in the discussion as a result as there was no chance of getting in a reply to a previous comment.Was pretty interesting, although I got the impression that the importance of Outlook and Office for businesses on the surface was underestimated by your team (I always wondered why it had never been released on Android or IOS)